Business is all about sales and sales is all about customers, so the obvious question is, “What does it take to build a steady supply of new customers?” The process of identifying and qualifying potential new customers is generally referred to as prospecting. In the old days, this meant trudging from shop to shop, hoping to find someone who would give you five minutes to make your pitch. Eventually, people started using the phone to try to make their pitch, or at least set appointments. This saved a little wear and tear on shoe leather, but the results of these cold calls were still pretty mixed.
These days, there are a couple of highly effective new ways to approach the ancient art of prospecting. These methods can really cut down on the hit and miss results of the old days, and leave you more time to do what you do best, interact with interested customers and close deals.
The first method involves making a clean break between developing leads and presenting sales information. It is called customer profiling, and all you need is a phone, a directory of phone numbers for potential customers in your particular area of interest, and a contact database like ACT or Outlook (there are a number of good ones to choose from). You will also need to develop a call script or survey to follow, so that the information you collect will be stored and analyzed in a systematic way. The idea here is to conduct a friendly survey of each potential customer. The questions you ask should be designed to identify anyone who has an interest or a need in an area of service that you provide. No effort should be made to do any selling on this call. Simply ask questions and make note of the answers to be entered into the contact database. Be friendly, courteous, efficient, and always express appreciation for the time and information your listener gave to you.
After the call, the database can help you rank this contact in terms of the level of interest or need you identified. The database then becomes the first stop for your sales staff when they begin their process of setting appointments. The information in the database will tell them where are those customers who are most likely to be interested in receiving information about your product or services. The list will least help them define which customers are probably most in need of your product or services, whether the customers realize it or not. You still have to set appointments and make presentations, but now you have eliminated a lot of the trial and error that used to be such a downer in the prospecting process.
More and more businesses these days are taking the exact opposite approach when it comes to prospecting. They are developing effective systems for driving highly qualified customers right to their door, or at least to their portal. We are talking Web portals, here, as in Internet websites. Most established businesses today have some sort of presence on the Internet. More to the point, however, more and more customers are becoming quite adept at searching for and even purchasing what they need over the Internet. The Internet has become the new Yellow Pages, and any business that doesn’t have a robust and user friendly website is almost certainly losing business. The process is so simple. A customer goes online, searches for the product or service you provide, finds your company website, and then submits a request for more information or places on order through your site. At the other end, your sales reps are standing by to follow up on these contacts. The closing rate can be extremely high, because you are following up on highly motivated customers who are ready to buy, and they liked enough of what they saw about your business from the website to pick you as a finalist in their search!
However, it is not exactly as simple as it sounds. The biggest drawback to trolling for customers via the Internet is that many businesses have poorly designed websites. Oh, they may have great layouts and pretty graphics or other special effects. However, all of that counts for practically nothing when it comes to reaching customers. Instead, what you need is a high page ranking. If your site does not rank at or near the top of the listings in your business category when people search for the products and services you provide, your potential customer probably won’t even know you are there. Most customers either find what they want or quit looking after only going a couple of pages deep into the listings that pop up. To address this challenge, an entire industry has grown up around the art of what is known as Search Engine Optimization. Good SEO technicians have the ability to include the right search term key words and programming algorithms to help the search engines “see” your site better and rank it higher. It can take a little tweaking and practice to get your site to light up, but it is definitely worth it. The customers who find you in this way are some of the most highly motivated buyers you are likely to find.
It is still true that business will always be exactly where you find it. But these days, how you look for it can make quite a difference in what you find!
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February Sales Quick Tip of the Month – Confirm Before You Suggest
Never forget that success in selling comes by putting what the customer really wants and needs ahead of your own desire to tell him how great your product is. It is hard to sell aged beef ribeyes to vegetarians, no matter how great the steaks taste to you. That is why you have to listen carefully and ask plenty of good questions during the early stages of your sales call. Eventually, you may recognize that your product will definitely meet your customer’s need. BUT, before you enthusiastically break in with what ought to be really good news, take the time to confirm what it is that you think you are hearing. Say something like, “It sounds to me like you are wanting something that will do _____. Is that right? Well, would you be interested if you could get ________ and ________, and it would fit into your present budget?” If you get affirmative answers to these confirming questions, then, and only then, are you ready to show him what you can do for him.
